1 900.] 



171 



April 24th-27th. A visit to Damascus was extremely interesting, 

 but added little to my collection. I took, however, on the window of 

 the railway carriage, a queer little Ammoplanus, which is either the 

 unknown $ of AKohlii, Schmiedekn. (an Algerian species) or entirely 



new. 



April 28th. We drove from Beirut to Brumana by a good road, 

 ascending in zig-zags up the side of Lebanon. Brumana is a large 

 village with Italian rather than oriental surroundings (pine planta- 

 tions, vine terraces, fig trees, and so forth), with a splendid view of 

 the sea and of Beirut itself in front, and the mountains towering in 

 all directions behind. Near this place and the neighbouring hamlet of 

 Beit-meri, Dr. Schmiedeknecht and myself made several very interest- 

 ing captures, and our Coleopterists, who ranged over a rather wider 

 area, were I believe equally successful. Here it was, on a series of 

 terraces by the high road, that we found perhaps the greatest curiosity 

 produced by our whole tour— a number of specimens (unluckily all 

 females) of Exoneura Ubanensis, Friese, the only pala'arctic species yet 

 discovered of a genus founded long ago by Frederick Smith on a 

 specimen from Australia. It has the general appearance and seemingly 

 the habits of a Ceratina, but differs widely in neuration from that or 

 any other genus. Here, too, I got my first Xylocopa Olivieri, Lep., 

 and a beautiful little new Eucera {ccerulescens^ Friese), which Dr. 

 Schmiedeknecht presently encountered again at Smyrna. 



Our holiday was now drawing to its close, and we crowned it with 

 a delightful voyage along the whole coast of Asia Minor from Beirut 

 to Constantinople. 



May 5th-14th. The steamer made halts of varying lengths at 

 sundry points along the coast, and we were thus enabled to sample the 

 insect fauna of Alexandretta (May 7th), Mersina (May 8th), Ehodes 

 (May 10th), and Smyrna (May 12th), at all which places we met 

 with as much success as could be expected from such flying visits. 



At Alexandretta, and I think also at Mersina, we were astonished 

 and amused at the multitudes of huge tortoises which swarmed in 

 every roadside ditch and watercourse, and the grotesque manner in 

 which they disappeared as we approached. A big tortoise sitting on 

 the back of a bigger, and both executing a simultaneous " header " 

 down a steep bank into a stream, is about as comical a sight as can be 

 imagined, and though tortoises are not insects, nothwithstanding the 

 railway porter's views, I hope I may be pardoned for this digression 

 anent them. 



At Constantinople all of us, except the indefatigable M. Pic, 



